by Fritz Leiber
He felt suddenly uneasy and out of things, and neither Rachel's deprecating remarks about her section of the wood carvings nor Joyce's interesting smiles helped much. He was glad when they all began to get up. He wandered outside and made his way to the children’s lean-to, feeling very depressed.
ONCE again he was the center of a friendly naked cluster, except for the same solemn-faced little girl skipping rope. A rather malicious but not very hopeful whim prompted him to ask the youngest, "What's one and one?"
"Ten," the shaver answered glibly. Tom felt pleased.
"It could also be two," the oldest boy remarked.
"I'll say," Tom agreed. "What's the population of the world?"
"About seven hundred million."
Tom nodded non-committally and, grabbing at the first long word that he thought of, turned to the eldest girl. "What's poliomyelitis?"
"Never heard of it," she said.
The solemn little girl kept droning the same ridiculous chant: "Gik-lo, I-o, Rik-o, Gis-so."
His ego eased, Tom went outside and there was Lois.
"What's the matter?" she asked.
"Nothing," he said.
She took his hand. "Have we pushed ourselves at you too much? Has our jabbering bothered you? We're a loud-mouthed family and I didn't think to ask if you were loning."
"Loning?"
"Solituding."
"In a way," he said. They didn't speak for a moment. Then, "Are you happy, Lois, in your life here?" he asked.
Her smile was instant. "Of course. Don't you like my group?"
He hesitated. "They make me feel rather no good," he said, and then admitted, "but in a way I'm more attracted to them than any people I've ever met."
"You are?" Her grip on his hand tightened. "Then why don't you stay with us for a while? I like you. It's too early to propose anything, but I think you have a quality our group lacks. You could see how you fit in. And there's Joyce. She's just visiting, too. You wouldn't have to lone unless you wanted."
Before he could think, there was a rhythmic rush of feet and the Wolvers were around them.
"We're swimming," Simone announced.
Lois looked at Tom inquiringly. He smiled his willingness, started to mention he didn't have trunks, then realized that wouldn't be news here. He wondered whether he would blush.
Jock fell in beside him as they rounded the ranch house. "Larry's been telling me about your group at the other end of the valley. It's comic, but I've whirled down the valley a dozen times and never spotted any sort of place there. What's it like?"
"A ranch house and several cabins."
JOCK frowned. "Comic. I never saw it." His face cleared. "How about whirling over there? You could point it out to me."
"It's really there," Tom said uneasily. "I'm not making it up."
"Of course," Jock assured him. "It was just an idea."
"We could pick up your camera on the way," Lois put in.
The rest of the group had turned back from the huge oval pool and the dark blue and flashing thing beyond it, and stood gay-colored against the pool's pale blue shimmer.
"How about it?" Jock asked them. "A whirl before we bathe?"
Two or three said yes besides Lois, and Jock led the way toward the helicopter that Tom now saw standing beyond the pool, its beetle body as blue as a scarab, its vanes flashing silver.
The others piled in. Tom followed as casually as he could, trying to suppress the pounding of his heart. "Wonder you don't go by rocket," he remarked lightly.
Jock laughed. "For such a short trip?"
The vanes began to thrum. Tom sat stiffly, gripping the sides of the seat, then realized that the others had sunk back lazily in the cushions. There was a moment of strain and they were falling ahead and up. Looking out the side, Tom saw for a moment the sooty roof of the ranch house and the blue of the pool and the pinkish umber of tanned bodies. Then the helicopter lurched gently around. Without warning a miserable uneasiness gripped him, a desire to cling mixed with an urge to escape. He tried to convince himself it was fear of the height.
He heard Lois tell Jock, "That's the place, down by that rock that looks like a wrecked spaceship."
The helicopter began to fall forward. Tom felt Lois' hand on his.
"You haven't answered my question," she said.
"What?" he asked dully.
"Whether you'll stay with us. At least for a while."
He looked at her. Her smile was a comfort. He said, "If I possibly can."
"What could possibly stop you?"
"I don't know," he answered abstractedly.
"You're strange," Lois told him. "There's a weight of sadness in you. As if you lived in a less happy age. As if it weren't 2050."
"Twenty?" he repeated, awakening from his thoughts with a jerk. "What's the time?" he asked anxiously.
"Two," Jock said. The word sounded like a knell.
"You need cheering," Lois announced firmly.
Amid a whoosh of air rebounding from earth, they jounced gently down. Lois vaulted out. "Come on," she said.
Tom followed her. "Where?" he asked stupidly, looking around at the red rocks through the settling sand cloud stirred by the vanes.
"Your camera," she told him, laughing. "Over there. Come on, I'll race you."
He started to run with her and then his uneasiness got beyond his control. He ran faster and faster. He saw Lois catch her foot on a rock and go down sprawling, but he couldn't stop. He ran desperately around the rock and into a gust of up-whirling sand that terrified him with its suddenness. He tried to escape from the stinging, blinding gust, but there was the nightmarish fright that his wild strides were carrying him nowhere.
Then the sand settled. He stopped running and looked around him. He was standing by the balancing rock. He was gasping. At his feet the rusty brown leather of the camera case peeped from the sand. Lois was nowhere in sight. Neither was the helicopter. The valley seemed different, rawer — one might almost have said younger.
Hours after dark he trailed into Tosker-Brown. Curtained lights still glowed from a few cabins. He was footsore, bewildered, frightened. All afternoon and through the twilight and into the moonlit evening that turned the red rocks black, he had searched the valley. Nowhere had he been able to find the soot-roofed ranch house of the Wolvers. He hadn't even been able to locate the rock like a giant bobbin where he'd met Lois.
During the next days he often returned to the valley. But he never found anything. And he never happened to be near the balancing rock when the time winds blew at ten and two, though once or twice he did see dust devils. Then he went away and eventually forgot.
In his casual reading he ran across popular science articles describing the binary system of numbers used in electronic calculating machines, where one and one make ten. He always skipped them. And more than once he saw the four equations expressing Einstein's generalized theory of gravitation:
He never connected them with the little girl's chant: "Gik-lo, I-o, Rik-o, Gis-so."
